Streaming Media Distribution in VANETs

Streaming applications will rapidly develop and contribute a significant amount of traffic in the near future. A problem, scarcely addressed so far, is how to support streaming traffic in vehicular networks (VANETs). This problem significantly differs from previous work on broadcast and multicast in ad hoc networks, because of the highly-dynamic topology of VANETs and the strict delay requirements of streaming applications. Our solution, completely relies on inter-vehicular communication for the distribution of multimedia content in a urban environment and it has the following appealing features: (i) it is fully distributed and dynamically adapts to topology changes; (ii) it leverages the characteristics of streaming applications to yield a highly-efficient, cross-layer solution. After optimally dimensioning the network system, we compare the performance of our solution against theoretical results for broadcast capacity in multihop networks.